And afterwards they would maybe share a smoke or go their separate ways, or else Edmund would hang around and watch the boats go by. Edmund could never leave. He had to see what the next ten minutes would bring.
Edmund walks to the Chelsea Piers. These are a series of industrial units containing sports facilities and conference spaces. Edmund White could enter now and play ice hockey. He could play soccer or ten-pin bowling. He could play basketball. He could do all manner of things that require the adding up of numbers, points, watching scores accumulate, lit beneath artificially brilliant light, move his body to the limits of physical endurance. He could become a physical creature again. He could count the seconds, time, as he used to. He could run on a treadmill or ride a stationary bike. But what would be the point of this? Why run on a machine when you can fuck?
19
In 1939, Moses tries to build a bridge across New York Bay, connecting the Battery with Brooklyn.
This bridge will cross infamous water. It will be more magnificent than Brooklyn Bridge. As a consequence the city will lose Battery Park, but this is a necessary sacrifice.
But Moses, although powerful, is not God. He cannot just click his fingers and have his own way. It seems that the public love Battery Park and they are willing to fight for it. They love seeing the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island. Those who work in the offices on Wall Street like a calm place to stretch their legs. The workers in the fish markets of South Street come here to get out of the crowds, throw a line in and wait for a catch. The idea of an imposing structure like a bridge cutting across the bay is obscene. It is as if they can all remember sailing into New York on immigrant ships, fresh from Ellis Island, the famous New York skyline before them. To have a bridge here blocking the view of the city is more grotesque than anyone can bear. To destroy Battery Park and Castles Clinton where the great singer Jenny Lind once sang!
Moses is ordered to build a tunnel instead. But a tunnel to Moses is just a hole in the ground. There is no point in building something no one can see.
He thinks, If they want a tunnel then that’s what they’ll get. But they’ll get other things besides.
He announces that the construction of a tunnel directly beneath Castle Clinton will weaken the structure, making the Aquarium there unsafe. So he evacuates the fish. The lights are switched off. The pumps are disconnected. The display cases are dismantled and scrapped. The castle stands empty.
Next, he tells the city that Castle Clinton is in need of structural repair, and as there is not enough money to pay for this, the castle will have to be demolished. He is not sentimental about the past. The past is nothing but a distraction of time. He orders a high wall to be built around Castle Clinton.
Campaigners fight to save the castle. They persuade the National Park Service to take it over. The castle is saved; the public have won! But Moses tells them they are too late for he has already knocked their castle down. He tells them that it’s gone, it’s all over. He says, You were the ones who wanted a tunnel. They all believe Moses – City Hall, the press. But one member of the public doesn’t. This man demands the key to the gate at Castle Clinton. He storms down there and lets himself in. He climbs over the pile of debris and sees the castle, standing as it has always stood, solid, permanent.
Eventually, the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel is built. For Moses, nothing at all has changed. Castle Clinton is left untouched. Traffic travels underground. Nothing can be seen by anyone. There are no visible changes here. The Battery remains the same and life goes on as it did before. No one is seen to be moving anywhere. A public work that remains invisible is just a waste of money.
Piers
(1975–86)
ALVIN BALTROP
Two men are standing in a derelict room amidst broken floorboards before three glassless windows. One man is crouching down, sucking the other man’s dick. His hand is pressed into the buttock of the other man. The other man is holding him by the shoulders and bending over, his curly hair hanging down.
Two men are lying naked side by side on the ground. The sun is streaming across their bodies. They are touching each other, a hand on a shoulder, a finger on a mouth. Their dicks are pointing towards one another as if engaged in conversation.
Three naked men are outside in the sunshine. One is lying on his front, legs spread. Another is sitting with his back to the camera. The last is standing with a leg perched on a wooden pylon, his buttocks large and round in the sun. He is wearing black plimsolls and white socks. The interior of the pier is black.
Many men are lined up along the pier, which has a large gash in its wall. Their bare legs hang over the Hudson. They are sharing conversation, sitting out in the sun.
A pier has deteriorated. Its outer shell is warped into undulations. Its shape reflects the choppy water beneath it.
A pier is an expansive white box. Manhattan looms in the distance, large and black. Two figures are standing on the pier, one bent over, the other behind.
A man, naked from the waist down, stands on a bollard and looks into the pier through a broken window.
A police boat is pulled up against the pier and tied there. Cops are standing around a naked corpse. The back of the corpse is marked with deep lacerations. Pulled freshly from the Hudson.
20
There is nothing compared to the feeling of being able to lie on a floor that you have laid yourself, says Walt. Covered over by a ceiling fitted by your own hands. The places where we live shape us, Bucke. My family and I built houses in Brooklyn. We marked out the plots and laid the foundations. We nailed in every plank of wood and secured every window. In many ways, building a house is the same as making a book. Many parts are added together to form a whole, and people live within both. I am a poet and a builder. In my experience, land developers and publishers always want to raise the devil and break things apart. They want to manipulate creation but, despite this, I have continued to build many houses and write many poems.
Bucke’s eyes have not yet grown accustomed to the dark. As a child, Bucke longed to die just to see what would happen. Would there be a God? He imagined there would be nothing. Not even consciousness left.
Splitting
(1974)
GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Gordon Matta-Clark has sawn through a wooden-framed house in New Jersey, splitting it in two.
The two halves of the house are leaning and separate.
Sunlight shines through the split.
The sky is visible through the split in the banister, floor and ceiling.
Rooms are separated by the split.
His friends come to visit him from New York. They park their van in an adjacent field and laugh about how far away they are.
What do your neighbours say? his friend says.
They say it’s about society pulling apart, he says.
I’m starving, she says. Do you have a kitchen? Or has the stove been cut in two?
Gordon likes the view from the top of the house. Standing on the roof and leaning as the roof leans, he looks out over the land. He feels good standing on this roof, but it is not New York. When he is in New York he walks all over the city. There, he stands flat-footed on the ground. The architectural rupture of that place at this time is greater than anything he can accomplish here.
21
You know, you should get a tattoo, says Robert Mapplethorpe.
I already have one, the man says.
Oh yeah? Where?
The man smiles.
I should have guessed, says Robert. Now turn around.
The man does what he’s told.
Robert moves the camera. He repositions the lamp. He takes a photograph.
I’m gonna use a whole roll, Robert says.
He takes more photographs.
Now just stand straight and tall. Look right into the camera. Don’t move, Robert says.
Robert has transformed his studio into a living-room scene with a comfortable armchair and a table lamp, a mantelpiece wi
th ornaments, a side table with deer antler legs.
The couple come in full leather gear, wearing chains and reins. They stand and sit. The man who is shackled at the wrists and ankles is sitting in the chair, his hands on his lap. His bearded partner is standing beside him, holding the reins and a riding crop. Their shadows loom on the wall behind them. Outside it is night. They look at the camera.
Robert’s leather portfolio includes: the glint of a dog collar and a leather jacket. A close-up of a genital pouch. Ramsey, New York, 1979 – black man, leather vest, penis out. Cock in a vice, nail hammered into the end. Next, all the blood resulting from this. The man’s fingernails are cut short and grubby. A laughing devil mask is positioned beside it. Two Men Ass Sucking, 1979. Face with a boot. Clothes-peg mouth: pegs secured to the top and bottom lips then fanned out. Gimps, cowboy, a man reclining. White male / bearded / kneeling on zebra bedspread / blinds in back / tattoo on arm (double | symbol) nipple ring, tear on. The man is pudgy and kneeling, leather trousers, his tongue is out. Richard, 1978, bloody cock on torture board with mask. Cock – penis/balls hanging out of white leather, 1981. Unidentified / Ass / Man facing backwards on toilet jock strap on, 1979. Ron Stevenson, Shaved Ass, 1978. Dominic and Elliot – grabbing cock and balls, 1979. Charles and Jim Freeman, 1976 – lunging in for a kiss and the chair is tipping. Jim and Tom Sausalito, 1977 / kneeling mouth open, no pee. The finger enters the head of the penis – Lou, NYC, 1978, similar to map184/ finger in penis hole. Knife in cock (the cock is fake). Muscle man dressed up in fishnets and bra, eyeliner, curly hair. He is sitting down and protecting his private parts.
In Floral Park, Harry Mapplethorpe looks out of his kitchen window. The front lawn is at least two inches longer than that of the neighbours. It is spreading into the flowerbeds. Harry sips his coffee and lights a cigarette. His friend is coming up the path.
Your grass is getting long out there, his friend says.
Just thinking the same thing, says Harry.
I took a trip into the city last week, Harry. I went to see Robert’s exhibition.
Harry looks out at the overgrown lawn.
I don’t know, Harry, I’m no expert, but there’s something seriously wrong with that kid.
The Flatiron
(1904)
EDWARD J. STEICHEN
The Flatiron Building emerges through the mist. The prow. A glorious ship coming to a rest. As beautiful as any painting.
22
If Edmund wants to write about New York he must try not to yearn for what is no longer there. But it is difficult to leave the past alone.
When Edmund wrote The Joy of Gay Sex he talked to all the men he knew and asked them about their lives and sexual preferences. He asked them what worried them the most. He talked to doctors and professionals. He asked them the risks and dangers of particular acts. He asked them what techniques they knew to be safe. He organized the information in an a–z list and wrote a paragraph on each – Anus, Blow Job, Body Image. Whenever Edmund grew tired of writing he made himself imagine the young boy sitting alone in his bedroom, looking out across the pastures of his family’s farm, confused by his emotions, without a friend in the world, without any guidance, containing desires, feeling afraid. Edmund thought about this lonely boy and he thought about himself. What if this boy could read Edmund’s book and finally understand that he was not alone?
Edmund sat in his New York apartment and he wrote alone. He wrote about sex on the street. He imagined it happening beneath his window. He imagined it filling up the city. He worked very hard on the book. He worked so hard that in order to have the time to write about sex he had to give up the sex. He was left with words only. He became a symbol of sexuality instead of a man. The writing, although enjoyable, could never replace the physical act. I am a man, he thought. I am made of flesh and blood.
Edmund takes the notebooks from his desk. He rips out the pages and lays them on the floor.
I remember when the city was different, not clean but fuggy, filthy.
The city, as it was then, was broken, on its knees, on the edge of disaster, and in many ways so was I.
He witnessed the birth of sexual revolution. Here it lies across the apartment floor on pages of unlined white paper, their edges scored and jagged from extraction, their edges ripped and torn from the hurry of wanting to put it all into place.
The man in the apartment across the street is watering his plants. He tips his whole body forward as he performs this act. He is wearing just a singlet because of the heat. He seems very old. His body is stiff. The movement of his tipping over is not smooth and continuous but a series of awkward individual labours.
Edmund pulls his books from the shelves and scans the pages for information. He wrote these passages himself but now they make no sense to him.
He switches on the television. A news feature shows a pretty woman standing on the steps of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of New York. Men, women and children are standing beside her in old-fashioned dress, self-consciously not looking at the camera – This is how it used to be – this is where we come from, from the Lower East Side where workers of this city built the industrial foundations on which we have secured a comfortable future –
He switches channel.
Eyes closed, grip, hard, intense, clutching. The man is red all over from exertion, he pushes, pushes. His partner is mute, trussed up, silenced with a gag, fellated and assaulted. This is ridiculous, yet Edmund watches.
Edmund is finding it hard to imagine.
Edmund sees life in bright flashes. These disjointed scenes come to him on a rolling film but with each vignette he has missed the titles and the set-up of the drama and he cannot get a handle on the plot. These are individual flashes of things he has seen or things he has invented – he isn’t sure which – he cannot remember – two men fucking in the corner of a dark club, right at the beginning of liberation. He watched two men in the dim candlelight and he thought the scene looked so romantic. It meant that things were changing, didn’t it? He was fresh back from Europe where everything was old.
He picks up The Joy of Gay Sex.
If you have trouble swallowing him whole, try it in the morning when the gag reflex is weaker.
And:
Old age is the unspoken horror of homosexuality. It is said that to grow old is a death sentence, but true love knows no boundaries. True love sees past things like age. If you love someone, age doesn’t matter. There are many physical pleasures to be had at any age, even if you are old.
23
Jane Jacobs is sitting at the window of her Hudson Street apartment in 1959. She is watching her neighbours sitting on stoops in the sun. They are sharing beers and lying back. Kids sketch hopscotch grids on the ground before them. As the sun drifts down the street, the kids drift with it. After an hour they are playing down the street. They join other kids sitting on the stoop there. Out comes a skipping rope, and this game takes over. Their skipping routines are fast and elaborate. They begin to attract a crowd of passers-by. When they are finished they bow to their audience. The crowd applauds and moves on. The children produce a deck of cards. They sit on the ground and deal out the cards.
This kind of thing happens all the time here. Children play in the street instead of the park because they want to be where the action is. Her own son likes to play in the street. He uses the narrow gap between two buildings as a safe place to store his treasured possessions: his tennis balls, his comic books. This space is his den, his hollow tree. Jane is happy to let him do this because her neighbours are watching from their stoops. Everyone is watching the streets. This is how New York works.
But residents are being cleared off the streets to make way for traffic, and Jane is worried. She knows that when the city planner looks down from his high tower he does not see a community; he sees only buildings blocking his way. To him, a city is just a problem to be solved. Jane thinks that the growth of a city should be slow and organic, its development as natu
ral as the growth of a leaf.
She closes her notebook and sits back. In her mind is an image of an empty city. She sketches the outline of Manhattan Island on the cover of her notebook – a diagram devoid of life.
24
Everyone is watching Bucke and Whitman as they walk through the dining car. Of course, they recognize Whitman. Or perhaps it is because Walt is wearing no overshirt, which is his custom on vacations. Bucke supposes this is all it is for him, just a vacation on a train.
Their accommodation is basic, a private room with two bench seats over which, at night time, are suspended two sleeping hammocks. While Bucke and Whitman are eating dinner, someone comes to hang and furnish the beds. While they are eating breakfast someone folds the beds away. Walt wants to know who performs these tasks. Bucke explains that the porter must do it. As soon as they sit down to eat, Walt dashes off. He returns an hour later. You were right, he says. There is a man who does it.
Bucke is struck by the darkness, the fading light. No one yet has come to light the lamps. A shadow has fallen across Whitman’s face. The sky is a darkening blue.
Tell me about the war, Bucke says.
It is through war that we understand our true capacity to love, says Walt. After witnessing horror one is filled with such an energy and sense of being alive – love spills from you – and something is formed from this. It is like building something very tall and wide. It is like building something that fills all space. You feel you could live for ever because the truth of it is that your body will not.
I love my brother very much, says Walt. And I loved the soldiers. When I saw the soldiers in that camp, I loved them more because they were all my brother. Love includes all things and all people, Bucke.
Everyone is Watching Page 7